Good Clean Fun

I love making soap. My sister & I taught ourselves how to make it a few years back and I will never get tired of it. There is just something about adding this horrible toxic lye solution to melted fats and oils and turning it into something completely different.
And the smell of curing soap is divine.
That's what it looks like in the pot. I'm using a stick blender to stir it up. When it reaches "trace", the additives such as essential oils, herbs, colourants go in. Then it's poured into the mold. I let it set overnight and the next day it comes out and gets sliced into bars.

These are the soaps I made yesterday. I did one with my "solstice" blend of essential oils, it's scented with orange, lemongrass, cinnamon, ylang ylang and peppermint. The other soap is "Lavenderwood", a blend of cedarwood, lavender, cypress and patchouli. Awesome stuff, smells like heaven in here. Now it has to cure for 4 to 6 weeks. The pics are kind of washed out looking, ah well. The drying rack in the last picture is something my DH made for me and it is truly awesome.

Elegant Elmer

I finally got around to coming up with an Elmer Lach colourway, thus completing the Punch Line, along with the Rocket Richard & Toe Blake colourways. I'm really loving Elmer, awesomely pretty yarn. He's my new favourite!



Sales have been slow in the shop, only three hanks sold plus a set of stitch markers in the past month. I'm gonna have to sit down soon and figure out what the profits are so far. I'd like to send off another cheque soon.
In other news, the Puck This! group on Ravelry is gonna be doing a hockey swap for the off season. I tried a swap once before and it pretty much sucked. Thankfully that group had "angels" for those who didn't get a package, and the person I sent my package to didn't bother to pick up hers. At least I got it back, but had to pay the return postage. That swap was a wee bit too expensive, I spent too much on the package and the postage ended up costing me around $30 total. Think of the yarn I could've bought with that! Anyway, I'm gonna give it another go, hockey knitters are, after all, a superior breed of knitter ;)
This weekend will be a soap making weekend for me. My DH, Chris, has eight (!) sisters who love my soap and I have been ordered to have more available for July. With the 4 to 6 weeks curing time needed, that means I need to make soap NOW! I'll get as much done as I can this weekend, and perhaps do some more next weekend. Some of my essential oils are running pretty low. I'll have to make a note of what I need to restock and start ordering more next weekend.

Ken & Toe

I did these new colourways maybe a couple of weeks ago. The one on the left is the Ken Dryden yarn. It was supposed to be Toe Blake, but it came out like Dryden. That's how it goes sometimes, I start out with an idea in my head and end up somewhere else, but it's all good. A Ken Dryden yarn was in my future anyway, I just hadn't figured out what it looked like yet. Turns out it looks like that. But I still didn't have a Toe Blake yarn, so I did that next. I likes them both.